


Daughter of a Wolf

by melannen



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Animal Abuse, Child Abuse, Gen, Psychic Wolves, Puppies, Winter, Wolves, montfermeil, soulbonding, wolfchildren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-11 09:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1823, in the small, bare yard behind the inn at Montfermeil, there was a wolf on a very short chain. M. Thénardier maintained this wolf so that he could tell people it was his wolf-brother, from his days fighting with the armies of the Emperor; and tell how it had helped to carry a great general to safety amid the carnage of Waterloo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daughter of a Wolf

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Which in Your Case You Have Not Got](https://archiveofourown.org/works/223466) by [Dira Sudis (dsudis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis). 



> Note: This takes place in the AU world derived from Dira Sudis's "Every Marine a Wolfbrother" series, derived from the Iskryne series by Bear and Monette. The only thing you have to know about this AU is that, throughout history, all soldiers and warriors have been soul-bonded to specially bred psychic wolves that fight beside them.
> 
> Also, this fic is about the Thénardier family, and therefore contains child abuse and animal abuse congruent to what is mentioned/implied in canon, but, uh, at least nobody, human or animal, dies? The ending is sort-of-not-awful-by-Hugo-standards?

1823

In the small, bare yard behind the inn at Montfermeil, there was a wolf on a very short chain. This wolf preserved something of the noble bearing and form of a loup-de-guerre, the great war-wolves that had accompanied the armies of France into battle since time immemorial. However, it was gaunt and savage, from confinement and neglect; the inhabitants of the inn rarely paid it more mind than throwing it the meager scraps from the inn's kitchen or sending the servant girl with a few inches of dirty water, carefully pushed into its reach after the evening's washing was done.

M. Thénardier maintained this wolf so that he could tell people it was his wolf-brother, from his days fighting with the armies of the Emperor; and tell how it had helped to carry a great general to safety from the carnage of Waterloo. His poor brother, he said with an attitude of great tragedy, had been so traumatized by the horrors of that last fight that he could no longer be trusted among people, being given to attacking at any hint of a threat, whether it was a true threat or not; but of course he could not abandon his dear brother, who he loved with all his heart, despite everything. When asked the wolf's name, he was likely to give a different answer every time.

In fact, this poor creature, unlucky though it appeared, had never been quite unlucky enough to be bonded to Thénardier; it was merely another of the forgotten castoffs of war that he had looted from the battlefields, brought home to add verisimilitude to his stories of heroism. In those days, in France, in the aftermath of a generation of war that had touched every citizen, it was not so difficult to come by such a creature. Perhaps, once, it had been bonded, and lost its brother, and not been so strongly bonded as to die with him. Perhaps as a puppy it had escaped, unbonded, from the breeding-pens of Napoleon, in those last chaotic weeks. Perhaps it had never been a war-wolf at all, but was the part-breed offspring of a wandering wolf-brother and a wild bitch. Whatever its past, now it survived on scraps of half-rotten meat, the occasional incautious rat, and its own simmering resentment. The only affection it was ever shown was by the little orphan girl called the Lark, who would sometimes steal a moment after delivering its water to sit just beyond the reach of its chain, near the only living creature she knew who had never been allowed to harm her, and sing to it in her cracked young voice:

_"Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,  
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours."_

No-one else in Montfermeil had ever heard her sing.

The winter of 1823-1824 was full of excitement. First there had been the fair set up in the town square, full of color and curiosities; then the stranger who had come to town on Christmas Eve, and taken the Lark away with him when he left; and then the police who had come in search of the girl and the stranger. When the policeman was there, it was suggested that Thénardier send the wolf after the girl, for surely it had her scent well enough: but he declared that he did not dare, for once set on the track, there would be no way to stop it from killing them both, and the girl at least had done nothing to deserve such a death. In fact, he was quite sure that if that chain were ever loosened from its stout post, the wolf would never be seen in Montfermeil again.

Soon enough, Montfermeil had other things to occupy its attention: for there was another wolf in the town, a great wild he-wolf, of the old French stock. This wolf had more of the loup-garou to it than the loup-de-guerre, more of the were-wolf than the war-wolf. He had come in from the woods, seeking food, perhaps, or something else. He was seen in the moon-light stalking down Boulanger Alley, huge and scarred, with a great white ruff, and his footprints the size of tea-saucers were seen all over town after the snow. Chickens and lap-dogs disappeared right out of yards, grandparents around the fireside resurrected the old stories of the Beast of the Gévaudan, and citizens began to bar their windows, and ban their children from going out after dark. Thénardier bragged that his inn, at least, would be a safe place, because his wolfbrother would keep the interloper away, in the face of all evidence that this wolf had as little in common with the creature in the yard as the inn's thin soup had with good beef stew. 

For several nights in mid-February, when the moon was full, the inhabitants of the inn heard a great noise of growls and clanking chains from the inn-yard where the wolf was tied. All of Thénardier's bravado held not a second against this: he send his wife to re-bar all the doors and check the shutters on the windows, and then locked the two of them inside their bedroom, with a heavy trunk shoved against the door. The Thénardier daughters, in their own room, pulled their heavy blanket over their head and huddled against each other to seal away the noises from outside. The Thénardiers' young son toddled to the window of the small room where he was kept, and looked down through the open shutters into the yard, and giggled.

In the mornings, however, the wolf in the inn-yard, though restless, was unharmed, and soon enough the wild wolf stopped coming to Montfermeil. The snow began to melt, the terrors of winter were forgotten, and Montfermeil crept slowly toward its spring. Wolves were no longer primal terrors from the dark forest to the inn, but once again only carried the small, nasty sort of fear that comes with having to look upon a creature you have chained but not tamed. 

With the Lark gone, the chore of feeding and watering the wolf fell to the daughters, Éponine and Azelma, who remembered some days, and some days did not; as their mother was unlikely to care if that particular chore was left undone, they let themselves forget more days than otherwise. If the wolf seemed to grow plumper and sleeker and more ill-tempered since the visits of the wild wolf, nobody noticed. And if they noticed, they blamed it on the fact that it no longer had to split the kitchen scraps with the Lark; or on the fact that, with the Lark gone and thus no-one to be whipped into doing the filthiest chores, the inn's rats had grown bolder and more numerous. Nobody thought it might be because the Lark no longer sang to it, for nobody had known the Lark sang at all. But the wolf's ill-temper seemed to have spread to all the household - or perhaps it was simply that the loss of the Lark had set them all snappish and at odds.

There was a day in April when the wolf in the yard set up a great racket: yowls and whimpers and screams and weird yipping noises, and the clank of the chain for half an hour unresting. The wolf's cries set off the little boy, who was locked upstairs in his room as usual, and began to wail and howl fit to out-do the wolf. The Thénardiess, short-tempered at her best, snapped at her daughters to go feed it to stop that damned noise or she would finally just strangle the ungrateful creature. When the girls didn't move she stomped over to the corner where they were playing and screeched at them to get moving before she lost her patience.

Éponine put down her rag doll, stood up, and asked, with an insolent tilt to her head, "Which one do you want us to feed, the wolf or the baby?"

Her mother snarled back, "Just shut your lip and do as I say."

Éponine snarled back, but she grabbed her sister by one hand and dragged her out of the kitchen.

"Where are we going?" Azelma asked.

"We're doing as our mother said," Éponine told her. She led them up to the room where their brother was kept; he was still screaming fit to wake the dead; she slammed the door open, and he stopped screaming in surprise at the noise. Éponine grabbed his collar with her other hand and then began to drag them both downstairs. "Mother wants the wolf fed so we'll feed the wolf. Mother wants the baby to shut up, so we're going to shut the baby up."

Azelma didn't realize what her sister meant by this until they had reached the inn-yard, and were approaching the edge of the packed-down circle that marked the limit of the wolf's pacing, the limit of their fear on the days when they were forced to give the beast its ration of scraps. 

"Éponine!" she said. "You can't feed the baby to the wolf."

"Can't I?" Éponine said grimly, both hands clenched into fists as she turned to confront her sister. "Why can't I? Who's to stop me? Why _shouldn't_ I? Nobody wants either of them here anyway."

Azelma was silenced by this show of impeccable logic. All the same, she felt, obscurely, that some kind of trouble would come to them both if they fed the baby to the wolf. "But Éponine--"

Meanwhile, the boy, left unattended by his sisters' argument, was watching the wolf. It had not leapt snarling to the end of its chain, as it generally did, but lay still next to the pole, staring at them with hate its yellow eyes. Curious, and still wobbly on his feet because nobody had ever attempted to teach him to walk, he crawled closer, well over the line of safety. The wolf growled at him, a deep, intense sound that went on and on. He giggled and sat down.

The girls looked up at this. "Well," said Éponine with satisfaction. "It is out of our hands now. We daren't go rescue him; I guess he will just have to be eaten."

"It's not eating him, though," Azelma noted, with just a trace of disappointment. "What is it doing?"

"It'll eat him yet," Éponine answered grimly.

The wolf stood and stalked over to where the boy sat, stiff-legged and hair raised. He did not move, but only looked up at it, and then reached two small dirty hands up toward its muzzle. The wolf growled again, but quietly, and then sniffed at his hand. Then it sniffed him all over, and with one defiant glare at the girls, picked him up by the collar much as Éponine had, and dragged him back to the post.

"What's wrong with it?" muttered Éponine. The wolf had never acted like this before; it was a puzzling upset of her plan. Perhaps it would kill him once it had dragged him away.

"Éponine!" Azelma squealed suddenly, and clutched at her. "There are puppies!"

In fact there were wolf-cubs: five little blobs of dark wet fur, clustered around the pole the chain was tied to. Three of them were wobbling around, mewling softly as they sought their mother. The other two did not move. The wolf dropped Gavroche among them, and then carefully lifted the two unmoving ones and carried them to the edge of her circle, where she dropped them. By the time she returned, two of the living cubs had crawled onto the boy's lap, and the other was trying to suck on one of his fingers.

"Perhaps she brought him there to feed him to the puppies," said Éponine, but she simply licked them - the three puppies, one at a time, and then, carefully, the boy's thick dark hair. Then she glared one more time at the Thénardier daughters, and laid herself carefully around the baby and her pups, her broad, bony back a wall between them and the sisters.

They stood there a little bit longer waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. When Éponine stood on her tiptoes to see over the wolf, the little brother had curled up and gone to sleep.

"Well, they stopped making noise," said Azelma finally, and Éponine frowned fiercely and grabbed her hand again. 

"Come on," she said. "We're going back inside."

Éponine was a girl with a good soul near-ruined by a bad upbringing, but she had saved enough of herself that even before they went inside, as soon as her anger at her mother had begun to cool, she had felt guilty about what she had planned for the little boy. She hadn't been willing to show doubt in front of Azelma, and she hadn't dared make any sign, under her parents' gaze that evening, that she had done any such thing; they had lost interest in the matter once the noise stopped. But that night, under the light of another full moon, she pulled the coverlet tight across her throat and murmured to herself, "I wouldn't have done it, if he hadn't crawled in himself. I wouldn't have, I would have stopped. And besides it all came out all right." One of her friends' fathers, in the town, had a wolfbrother, and she and her siblings were often left in the wolf's care, even when they had been as young as Éponine's brother. Surely she'd always known nothing would happen to the baby, not really; surely she had not meant to harm him; surely he was better with the wolf than he would have been crying alone in his bare room.

Azelma beside her was a warm lump, deeply asleep. Éponine slipped quietly out of bed and crept down the stairs. She stood in the door to the inn-yard, the moolight casting her shadow back into the inn. The wolf raised her head to look at her. In the moonlight they were both inscrutable, two females communicating something neither of them understood. Behind the wolf-mother, the boy woke, and pulled himself to his feet with one hand gripping the wolf's shaggy neck-fur. "Éponine!" he said happily. He spoke rarely but understood much.

The wolf shook him off of her with one great ruffle, and then walked, carefully, almost delicately, to the end of her chain, until she was directly opposite Éponine. The cubs, left behind, snuffled closer to the little boy, who sat upright, watching. Éponine walked forward until only a handspan separated her from the wolf's muzzle, scarcely knowing what she was doing. She had never seen the wolf like this before; she had only seen her snapping and snarling, trying to attack anyone who came near, or crouched resentfully as she kicked a water-bowl into her reach. Tonight she was none of those things: she was silver, and she was stillness with motion underneath, like moonlight on a spring. Éponine slowly sank down to her knees in front of the wolf, and the wolf nosed at her, curiously. She realized that the wolf did not only look like moonlit springwater: she smelled like it, somehow; she smelled like blood and misery and milk and unwashed wolf, but somehow there was also the smell of coming upon a spring in the forest at night when you were very thirsty and the air was hot and dry.

"Is that... is that your name?" Éponine breathed. She had heard about wolves' scent-names from her friend, but somehow, she had never thought that the wolf in the inn-yard might have a scent-name: unless they were making a joke of it, her parents always simply called her "the wolf", or sometimes "that cursed beast of yours". Now it seemed strange that the wolf might ever be called anything else. "Thank you," said Éponine. "My name is Éponine."

The wolf gave a long, deep sigh, with more air in it than human lungs could handle, and then turned and slowly walked back toward the pile of cubs. Éponine watched her go, feeling some terrible sensation she could not name. The wolf stopped, when she had almost reached the pole, and turned to look at Éponine. _Aren't you following?_ she asked with that gaze.

Éponine stepped forward into the circle of dry dirt that had been off-limits all her short life, forgetting to be afraid. Her brother grinned at her, and then handed her a wolf-pup. It had its eyes closed, and looked more like a doll than a wolf, but she could feel its heart beating rapid and strong against her hands. The wolf-mother leaned against her, with all of her warm weight. Éponine sat down only because she could no longer stand up.

The next morning, as soon as their parents were too distracted to notice, she took Azelma with her to meet all of the wolves.

Their parents were too distracted for quite some time. The Thénardiess preferred to pretend the wolf didn't exist, and her husband rarely noticed anything that did not directly concern his current projects. In a huddle with the wolf-cubs, they were safe from their mother's idle anger and their father's frustrated lashing-out, both of which they had learned to fear in the months since the Lark went away. Gavroche did not leave the wolf-mother at all; Éponine began to bring his bowls of porridge and dregs of broth to him in the yard rather than in his room.

Eventually, though, Thénardier was heard to say, "What have you done with your son? I haven't heard him screaming recently."

Éponine bent her head down over the stocking she was mending and gave no sign that that she was listening.

The Thénardiess frowned, as she began to realize she didn't remember the last time her son had forced himself on her attention. "Éponine!" she barked. "Has he been eating?"

"Yes," said Éponine, and stabbed herself in the finger with her darning needle.

"The wolf has him," Azelma said, suddenly, in her soft voice.

"What?" shouted the father.

"I'll show you," Azelma said, and opened the door to the yard. Her parents followed her, frowning. Éponine hung back, her mending still in her hand.

The elder Thénardiers stared out at the wolf's yard in shock. Suddenly, the Thénardiess started laughing. It was an unfamiliar sound, and a terrible. "Husband," she said, "Your 'wolf-brother' has had puppies! Did you never look at her close enough to tell--?"

"Be quiet, woman," he said, and strode toward the wolf. He was imagining the reaction of the inn's regulars if they should discover that his 'wolf-brother' had actually been a sister all along; the images came to him so vividly that he had not yet noticed the boy among the wolf-cubs. He did not dare step within reach of the chain, however - she had been young and starved and wounded when he had chained her there, so many years ago. She no longer was. "Éponine," he said, without turning his head, "bring me my gun."

"No!" said Éponine.

Now he did turn. "What did you say to me?" he said, with a terrible anger in his eyes. Éponine had never been the one who answered docilely to her parents' commands, but this was the first time she had defied her father outright.

"I said no," she told him. "You will not shoot them." She strode across the yard, not even looking down as she crossed the line to the wolf's territory, and stood in front of them, her arms spread. Azelma watched her stride past, and then, with one small look at her mother, followed.

"You will not shoot them unless you shoot me first, Father." Azelma reached up and grabbed one of her outstretched hands. Their brother pulled himself up by the hem of Éponine's gown and grabbed the other, so that the three of them made an uneven line across the yard. The wolf-mother stood just behind them, her muzzle outthrust over Éponine and Azelma's clasped hands, growling steadily. The cubs, curious, their eyes just open, tumbled after, one at the feet of each child.

"Wife," said Thénardier, still more terrible, "Fetch your children." He was at a terrible impasse: he dared not face the wolf to retrieve them himself, but even he would hesitate to shoot while they stood so near.

The Thénardiess said nothing. Something strange was happening to her, as she watched the children and the wolves. Her hands, red and meaty like slabs of ham, were trembling at her sides. Something wild in her that had long been asleep had stirred with her laughter.

Thénardier looked at her in disbelief. "Will you, too, defy me?"

She shook her head, slowly. "No. But I will _think_. Think, husband." She waved her hands at the children. "Think of what use they could be if they bond. A true wolf-pack, under your control."

"Hah," said Thénardier, humorlessly. "That useless lot? Bond? When even I couldn't?"

"Are you so sure, then," said the Thénardiess, "that our children will never be warriors?" Her hands still trembled. Her voice did not.

Thénardier took a breath, then another, and walked back to the house. "Until they are weaned," he said. "I will give them until they are weaned. I suppose we can sell them in Paris for a few sous, if only for the meat. And the bitch gets shot. I was growing tired of her anyway." And he shut the kitchen door behind him.

Azelma's wolfbrother's scent-name was "hot-death-on-a-cold-wind-from-the-forest", but they all called him Snowy. The boy's wolfbrother's scent-name was "newly-dead-rat-bleeding-onto-snow"; if he ever called him by a human name, no-one else ever learned it. Éponine's wolfsister's name was "M.-Thénardier's-lifeblood-pouring-from-his-shredded-throat-onto-frozen-ground"; but to those outside the pack, she was never called anything other than "Bitch". The night after they killed their first rat on their own, their mother disappeared from the end of her chain, and was never seen in Montfermeil again.


End file.
